PlayStation.Blog

The State of PlayStation Home

As many of you know, 2009 was a big year for PlayStation Home. The millions of you that use PlayStation Home saw us transform from a 3D virtual world into a true social gaming platform with more than 50 spaces and over 100 games. One of the biggest highlights of the year was the launch of the popular Sodium One space, which has redefined what a social game can be by combining massive action, stunning graphics and social experiences in a way never done before. PlayStation Home has become a leader in the evolution of social games from simple 2D web games to immersive high-definition 3D experiences made possible by the tremendous horsepower of the PlayStation 3.

As we start the new year, we are not slowing down. We are adding new spaces, community events and virtual items each and every week, with many of these updates based directly on your feedback. Last week marked an important milestone in our evolution with a new iteration of the Mall, which was heavily influenced by our community’s request to have a more streamlined shopping experience. The Mall now features stores from some of our closest partners, including Loot from Sony Pictures who brought us all of the awesome Ghostbusters gear, our friends at Lockwood – creators of Sodium, and of course EA Sports, who have been among the strongest supporters of PlayStation Home since the earliest days after launch. One new face to PlayStation Home is LucasArts, who brought both Star Wars and Indiana Jones to their new store in the PlayStation Home Mall. I for one will be rocking the Imperial Stormtrooper outfit for the foreseeable future.

PlayStation Home is based on a “freemium” model, which allows you, our community to play games, meet friends, explore and discover rewards – all for free. In addition, there are opportunities to personalize your experience with virtual items that allow you to stand out from the crowd, or even play your favorite games in PlayStation Home better (thank you Stomper Boots!) Whether you buy virtual items or just play games and hang out, I would like to extend a huge “thank you” for your support from everyone on our team.

With all that said, this is just the beginning of what we have in store for you. Many of our long time community members have been asking for features, fixes and content that we have been secretly hard at work on, and will be rolling out over time. Rest assured that we hear your requests loud and clear (I personally use Home and read the forums daily), and although we can’t deliver everything we’re asked for, we will compliment all of these new features and content with a renewed focus on open dialogue and service. Our Home Community Managers, along with myself, continue to work on addressing your questions regarding our direction for the next year, so stay tuned to the PlayStation Home forums for what is sure to be a lively conversation!

We have an incredible number of new surprises ahead, so if you’re not already a member of the PlayStation Home community, there has never been a better time to jump in and experience all of the fun.

We have no announcements about that today, but keep your eyes glued here on the blog and on the forums as this is where we will be addressing the bulk of our community requests. We won\’t be able to deliver everything we\’re asked for, but we\’re going to sure try.

Jack, THANK YOU for finally addressing us with this. I along with several others have been very frustrated at the lack of communication between the guys in charge and the fan community such as myself.

I was one of the most excited by Home, but seeing at how little the mods communicated with us, it just got all the more frustrated. I like that you guys hear us loud and clear, but it would be a HUGE benefit to let us KNOW that you do! After all, if Home is STILL a Beta, we should feel as though we have an actual voice in the development here. We have a common goal: and that’s to see Home excell as the BEST social gaming network avaiable… so, thanks for stepping out.

Also, it would be nice to occassionally whet our appetite with a little bit more clarity in your statements about what’s coming.

For example, we’re tired of hearing “exciting changes over time”… because in our past experience, that’s been weeks-to-months worth of waiting, and we don’t even know what we’re supposed to be excited for… so, a little more clarity like, “certain changes regarding media sharing will be announced approx next month” that would help us out a TON!

No, thank you Jack. Thank you for making this all happen. You, Sony, and the PlayStation Home team made social network a new name and changed it. You re-invented social to the network in PlayStation Network. So thanks so much for giving us a good 2009 on our PS3’s. Good luck this year for a whole new 2010 ”Home”.

The first priority in Home right now should be to eliminate the waiting process. If you accomplish this…. well, I’d be on more often. But it’s ridiculing to just… wait on end. That’s why it’s a love hate relationship with most people. Make it more integrated and streamline it!

The mall looks great.. keep up the amazing content updates… And LucasArts what were you thinking with those item prices??? LucasArts store = EPIC FAIL!!!! expensive these prices are!! not be buying i will.. LOL ;)

The problem is theres not enough features such as voice chat, trophy room. XMB integration such as in game music, videos, and even use your home avatar as your PSN avatar like Xbox does, not enough home rewards with games, etc. etc.

Sony you expect ppl to buy all these virtual items but why would we when theres not enough features in Home to make me want to buy stuff there anyway. Homes a Beta they say? then i wont buy stuff for home until its finished :)

Hate to say it, but that just shows how out of touch you guys are. Have you REALLY been to the forums? People with opinions are driven out by your trolling HCVs, or shut down by Lithium staff. It’s “heavily controlled” conversation, not lively in any sense of the word. You can’t hear us, because we are moderated beyond belief. Some things we need to be respectfully frank about, but it just gets shoved to the side.

Thanks for the positive notion, though! I’m sure the average Home user who doesn’t follow the forums will get real motivated by this blog post!

I use Home a couple times a month, usually go on when there’s a big update. I would go on more often, (like #9 and #11 pointed out already) if it was more streamlined and fast to login and not waiting several seconds for just images to pop up.

the blog is mostly automated anymore. hell we cant even watch videos from our PS3 lol jeff and chris got shafted. Sony has alot of things that still need fixed and addressed. Home is nothing but a huge advertisement with playable commercials right now imo hahah

I can understand the legal headaches of Virtual TVs and radios in Home, but I dont understand why you can’t just offer internet radio like the PSP has.

New animations have gone a long way to creating a more natural feeling to our avatars but they still feel horribly stiff.

Why is it the free videos that are available in the PSN store are different fromthe videos that play on screens in home? If I downloaded a PULSE video from the store then Home show just play that video off my HDD rather than wasting time loading it again when I walk into the mall.

Lastly I’d like to see an end to the need for EVERY SINGLE SPACE requireing a re download whenever Home gets an update. If there’s no change to the Uncharted space I shouldn’t have to waste time redownloading it. Not everyone has a connection that downloads 45mb in 10 seconds.

I find this encouraging. I frequent Home to some degree, and I’ve enjoyed my overall experiences, during both closed and open phases of the ongoing beta. While I miss the ability to voice chat freely, I’m hopeful of it making a return, one day. I’m also especially pleased that Home-specific minigames have seen an increase in the quality of their production, Sodium One being the example in mind.

That said, I look forward to seeing where Home goes, and what is encountered along the way. Otherwise, thanks for your efforts in developing and maintaining Home; it’s worth returning to.

2009 highlight: Dice-throw/random-number emote addition. I’ve only been asking for it since I joined the EU Beta at the end of April 2007. :p The three year anniversary of having Home installed on my PS3 is close, crazy.

Here is a video of the very first Beta stage (which I got permission to post last year):

I’m curious Mr. Jack exactly what it is we have to look forward to? We’re constantly told for months on end “wait and something good will come,” and all we get are ridiculous dance offs and broken games. I’d like to know WHAT it is I’m looking forward to. I understand the gaming industry is packed with secrets, intellectual property rights, and non-disclosure agreements. But would it kill you to let us know what the status of the core update? Or when we can expect to not wait 10-30 minutes for bootup?

As for the “games” most are completely terrible. I wouldn’t use this as a bragging right. When they function, which is rare, most times the game is simply just duller then dirt.

My apologies for being brutally honest, but I’ve sunk HUNDRES of dollars into home, and it honestly hasn’t been worth it yet.

I’m enjoying the Neptune Apartment but am getting a bit sick & tired of seeing the same sperm whale swim by the windows. Is there any chance that a wider variety of sea animals could swim by the windows, please?

Also, I would like to see an underwater public space where everyone’s avatar would be required to wear SCUBA gear and explore the bottom of the ocean with sea creatures and plants.

I don’t really care about new features, but please, PLEASE make sure you fix Home stability, load times when starting up, when using the wardrobe, loading new spaces, etc. Increasing the cache size feels useless right now so I reduced it back to 3gb and funnily enough, Home is now faster but can still use improvement.

Oh and let’s not forget the Central Plaza glitch which has been going on around the time 1.30 released.

I am a European user, more specifically a British user. I appreciate all the effort, love, thought and everything else that has gone into Home. And I love Home itself.

A lot of content has been brought into Home itself. I recently read an update contained over 400 items in a single update for the North American version of Home, and I am glad of the continued and even the expanding support of Home.

However, this is the North American version of Home we are talking about. If I remember correctly, the European update of Home consisted of a handful of furniture and a personal space which had to be pulled and rereleased due to a bug.

In fact, I can mention just a few things in comparison to the European version of Home. The NA Home has more personal spaces (some of them with a European theme to boot) of the four regions, it has the most public spaces of the four regions and It has the most number of unique items (clothes, furniture, ornaments and so on) of the four regions.

I read the English community forums for Europe every day, and week after week, you have users threatening to emigrate to the American Home because of the often paltry content updates being offered (thereby violating the terms of service). Don’t get me wrong, the European Home team do an amazing job with the content being offered, and the community does a fine job of being, well, a community.

What I ask, however, is: What’s being done to bridge the gap between America and the rest of the World?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Europe where the most Playstation 3’s have been sold? Therefore, it becomes your biggest community, and arguably, your biggest priority.

It’s funny, and sad at the same time, to see how blind you are, Jack. Do you even use Home? Do you EVER read the Lithium forums? I bet one of your interns probably just typed up some current events about Home, handed them to you, then you vomited that info up here on this blog.

If you Really wanna see what’s happening in Home, maybe you should check out http://home-watch.blogspot.com/ Hell maybe just read the news once in a while, there’s plenty of stories about how people use Home to lure young kids to them to abuse them, among other things.

Any chance of getting playstation home to have some offline use? like creating or changing your avatar and changin your personal space. I think it would be good for those who dont go online that much or at all.

So, no offering on “Optional Subtitle” to be embedded or implemented in PS HOME? How shame. I really want to participate events that require me to listen to the videos and to answer the questions via trivial events. Without Optional Subtitle- I am simply all but a sitting duck. Thank you Jack Bauser and whoever works on PS HOME to PREVENT THAT EVENTS FROM ALLOWING PEOPLE TO BE TRULY INVOLVED. Thank you, TRULY.

Thx Jack, I agree with the above. Please fix some of the stability and load issues, and also when is the Hot Shots Golf space going to be fixed? It still doesn’t issue the reward couch! Other than that, Motorstorm space is awesome and so are the rewards.

I used to visit Home, but EVERYTIME you guys updated it, I had to RE-DOWNLOAD EVERY SPACE that I previously had access too. That’s a big NO-NO, and if you haven’t change that, well Home to me doesn’t exist until you fix it.

ALSO, announce home updates on the XMB news strip or something, and make them available to download from the PS Store (make a Home site inside the store or something or inside the XMB folder, whatever suits you) so people can download stuff from there too (and leave the system set to auto-off when everything is finished downloading)… Thanks, and hopefully I’ll do more in Home this year than I did in it’s first 14 months of Beta status…

The state of HOME is a sorry one yet you’d paint it otherwise? No mention of how buggy it is? This program crashes my PS3 constantly like nothing else! That kind of stuff doesn’t slide with other PS3 software and it sure shouldn’t with HOME. Who developed this thing anyway? I can’t imagine it was any real game developer as Sony studios alone have put out many great games on the PS3 with open worlds and minimal loading, yet HOME is a bunch of tiny rooms and still chugs. Is it running off of only 1 SPU or something? I try to enjoy it for what it is but it fights me tooth and nail every step of the way. The long loading, extreme slowdown and crashing needs to go. Then you can get back to selling non-existant things that are now costing as much as actual games (for example LocoRoco apartment and LocoRoco Cocoreccho share the same price).

To those who dream of visions past WAKE UP, Phil no longer controls Home. And whatever takes its place will be what you either have to accept or NOT!

I for one am glad that they at least said something but it still reads like an Obama Speech, lots of words but very little meat.

Listen Home is what it is and is getting better but it is the users that are actually keeping it from being better than it is. With all the racial slurs and abuse of females and males ( I was danced in the face by many males sitting on a bench in CP) and it makes me not want to return. And with just about every other juvenile playing their favourite RAP artist over the mic we lost the ability to even voice chat because keying the mic that long caused the servers to slow down so that other users could not login. When it comes back I hope it never does the way it was before…

And a GREAT THANK YOU TO SONY FOR PROVIDING HOME FOR US TO SOCIALIZE IN, now make it better…

Yeah please focus on a few updates that would improve the functionality of Home. We don’t need new spaces and costumes every update when you cannot go from space to space without a loading screen or downloading the space over and over again.